To
Sea with a Blind Scientistby
Geerat J. Vermeij
Reprinted from the Braille Monitor

Editor's
Note: Scientific research is not a career most people believe
to be suitable for the blind, but such beliefs are changing. Dr. Geerat
Vermeij is a nationally recognized marine biologist. He conducts research
and teaches students at the doctoral level. Dr. Vermeij tells us that
science is competitive, tedious, and hardand, that he loves it.
Here is what he has to say:

How,
a skeptic might ask, could a blind person ever hope to be a scientist?
After all, science is difficult if not impenetrable even for many sighted
people; and, in any case, there is almost nothing in the way of books
about science available to the blind. How would one carry out experiments?
How would one gain access to the huge scientific literature? Perhaps
a blind person could be a physicist, at least a theoretical physicist,
but surely not a biologist. Why would the blind willingly choose biology,
that most visual of all the sciences?

The
answer is very simple. Science, and for me biology in particular, is
absolutely fascinating. Someone is actually paying me to study shellssome
of the most beautiful works of architecture in all of naturein
the expectation that broad principles with implications for our own
species will emerge.

What
is more, I get to travel to exotic places, to read the scientific literature
in all its fantastic diversity, to see my own papers and books published,
and to teach others about science, that most powerful of all ways of
knowing. What more could one ask of a profession?

Like
many of my colleagues, I came to science early in life. Even as a small
boy growing up in the Netherlands, I picked up shells, pine cones, pretty
stones, and the like. My parents, both of whom are avid natural historians,
took pains to acquaint me with all kinds of creatures that lived in
the grassy polders and in the innumerable ditches that crisscrossed
the Low Land. The fact that I was totally blind made no difference at
all. At the age of ten, shortly after moving to the United States, I
became seriously interested in shells. Almost immediately I started
my own collection, which soon grew to include all manner of other objects
of natural history. My parents and brother were enthusiastic; they read
aloud, transcribed, or dictated every book on natural history they could
find.

The
reactions of my teachers in the local public elementary school ranged
from polite acceptance to genuine enthusiasm when I told them of my
intentions to become a conchologist, a malacologist, or a biologist.
If they thought about the incompatibility between blindness and biology,
they kept it to themselves, or perhaps they expected my obsession to
be a passing fancy soon to be replaced by more realistic plans.

The
interest in biology did not flag. As counselors more openly expressed
their fears that I would be unable to find employment if I persisted
in my plans to study biology, I entered Princeton University to concentrate
on biology and geology. There I received strong support from nearly
all my professors; they were giants in their fields, and their enthusiasm
sustained my youthful confidence.

I
applied to do doctoral work at Yale. When I arrived for my interview
in the biology department, the director of graduate studies was more
than a little apprehensive. During my talk with him, he took me down
to the university's shell collection in the basement of the Peabody
Museum. Casually he picked up two shells and asked me if I knew them.
He fully expected me to draw a blank, in which case he planned to tell
me as gently as possible that biology was not for me after all.

Fortunately,
however, the shells were familiar to me. All of the misgivings of the
director instantly evaporated. Thanks to his enthusiastic endorsement,
I was able to enter Yale with a full graduate fellowship that left me
free to travel and to carry out an ambitious research project culminating
in the Ph.D. dissertation. After Yale, I joined the Department of Zoology
at the University of Maryland at College Park in 1971, first as an instructor.
Moving up through the academic ranks, I was appointed professor in 1980.
Along the way, I married Edith Zipser, a fellow biologist whom I had
met at Yale, and we had a daughter Hermine, who is now six. Very recently
I accepted a new appointment to become Professor of Geology at the University
of California, Davis. What do I actually do in my job that seemed so
improbable to the skeptics? Again the answer is simple. I do what my
sighted colleagues do: research, teaching, and service.

My
research centers on how animals and plants have evolved to cope with
their biological enemiespredators, competitors, and parasitesover
the course of the last six hundred million years of earth history. When
I was still a graduate student, working at the University of Guam Marine
Laboratory, I noticed that many of the shells I was finding on the island's
reef-flats were broken despite their considerable thickness and strength.
It soon became clear that shell-breaking predators, especially crabs
and fishes, were responsible for this damage. I began to suspect that
many of the elegant features of tropical shellstheir knobby
and spiny surfaces, their tight coiling, and the narrow shell opening
often partially occluded by knob-like thickeningswere interpretable
as adaptations which enabled the snails that built the shells to withstand
the onslaughts of their predators.

Most
interestingly, the shells I had collected in the West Indies and the
Atlantic coasts of South America and Africa seemed to be less well endowed
with this kind of armor than were the shells from comparable sites in
the tropical Western Pacific. Armed with these observations and hypotheses,
I applied for funding from the National Science Foundation to continue
my work upon my arrival at Maryland.

When
the program director called me to say that I would be funded, he also
informed me that the Foundation would not sponsor my proposed field
work in the Indian Ocean because he could not conceive of a blind person's
doing field work. I reminded him that I had already worked in field
situations throughout the tropics, and that the proposed research critically
depended on the work in the Indian Ocean. After a few minutes of conversation
he relented and awarded me the full amount.

How
do I do my research? It is a combination of field, laboratory, museum,
and library work that has taken me all over the world to coral reefs,
mangrove swamps, mud-flats, rock-bound open coasts, deserts, rain forests,
research vessels, marine biological stations, secret military installations,
great libraries, and big-city museums.

I
make large collections of specimens in the field, work with living animals
in laboratory aquaria, measure shells in museums and in my own very
large research collection, and read voraciously. Wherever I go I am
in the company of a sighted assistant or colleague.

Often
this is my wife, but there are many others as well. There is nothing
unusual about this; every scientist I know has assistants. I keep detailed
field and laboratory notebooks in Braille, usually written with slate
and stylus. Once a week I go to the U.S. National Museum of Natural
History, part of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington in order
to work with the outstanding collection of mollusks and to peruse carefully
all the scientific periodicals that came into the library the previous
week. While my reader reads to me, I transcribe extensive notes on the
Perkins Brailler. Sometimes I will make just a few notations of the
main point of a scientific paper, but at other times I transcribe all
the data contained in a paper. My Braille scientific library now comprises
more than eight thousand publications compiled in more than one hundred
forty thick Braille volumes.

Like
many of my colleagues, I spend a great deal of time writing. First,
I prepare drafts on the Perkins Brailler, using the seemingly inexhaustible
supply of memos and announcements that flood my mailbox daily. Once
I am satisfied with the text, I type the manuscript on an ink typewriter.
An assistant proofreads and corrects the manuscript, which is then submitted
to an appropriate scientific periodical or book publisher for a thorough
evaluation.

In
all my work I find Braille to be vastly more efficient than any other
form of communication. I also prefer live readers to tape recorders.
How can you ask a machine to spell words, to ferret out a detail in
a graph or table, and most importantly to skip whole sections or to
scan the text for a particular point?

Teaching
has always been inextricably intertwined with research for me. I can
point to several papers that would not have been written were it not
for the fact that I was forced to think about problems in connection
with a lecture on a topic quite far removed from my immediate research
interests.

Over
the years I have taught a great variety of coursesanimal
diversity, evolutionary biology, ecology, marine ecology, malacology,
the mathematics and physics of organic form, and a seminar on extinctionranging
from the introductory to the advanced graduate level.

In
the large introductory courses, teaching assistants take charge of the
laboratory sections and help in grading papers. Again, there is nothing
unusual in this. Professors in science departments at most universities
depend heavily on teaching assistants. Like other research-oriented
professors, I train graduate students. Thus far, seven students have
received their Ph.D. degrees under my direction.

The
service part of the job is highly varied as well. There are the inevitable
committee meetings and the many tasks that help make the department
or the university run smoothly. I head search committees to find new
faculty members, I conduct reviews of faculty performance, and I write
as few memos as I can. An important service to the profession is the
review of dozens of manuscripts and grant proposals. If one writes them,
one ought to be willing to review them as well.

Of
course, science isn't all fun and games. Science is competitive; it
is hard work, full of tedious calculations, revising manuscripts for
the tenth time, of coping with the disappointment of having a cherished
paper or grant proposal summarily rejected, and of quibbling about grades
with a frustratingly inept student. Nobody in science is exempt from
pressures and feelings such as these, but in the end the work is immensely
rewarding and intellectually fulfilling.

In
short, there is nothing about my job that makes it unsuitable for a
blind person. Of course, there are inherent risks in the field work;
I have been stung by rays, bitten by crabs, and detained by police who
mistook my partner and me for operatives trying to overthrow the government
of their African country, and I have slipped on rocks, scraped my hand
on sharp oysters and pinnacles of coral, and suffered from stomach cramps.
There isn't a field scientist alive or dead who hasn't had similar experiences.
Life without risk is life without challenge; one cannot hope to understand
nature without experiencing it firsthand. The blind, no more than the
sighted, must act sensibly and with appropriate caution. Along with
independence comes the responsibility of assuming risks.

What
would I say to a blind person who is contemplating a career in science?
Very simple. I would tell that person exactly what I would tell a sighted
one: Love your subject, be prepared to work hard, don't be discouraged
by doubters and by the occasional failure, be willing to take risks,
get as much basic science and mathematics as you can take, and perhaps
above all display a reasoned self-confidence without carrying a chip
on your shoulder. You will need stamina, good grades, the support of
influential scientists, and a willingness and ability to discover new
facts and new ideas. It is not enough to do well in courses; one must
make new observations, design and carry out tests of hypotheses that
have been carefully thought out, and interpret and present the results
in such a way that the work is both believable and interesting to others.
Science is not for everyone, but I can think of no field that is more
satisfying.

What
would I say to the educational establishment? I would tell them that
the prevailing attitudes about science and the blind must be reformed.
For too long the scientifically inclined blind have been steered only
toward the social sciences and other "safe" disciplines, and away from
fields in which laboratory and outdoor studies are important.

I believe that the chief factor holding the blind back from science
is ignorance, not only by virtue of woefully inadequate reading materials
in the schools and libraries, but also because of the pervasive fear
and discouragement by the establishment to let the blind observe nature
firsthand. I once met a blind woman who professed an interest in biology,
yet she had never been encouraged to touch the spiny leaves of the holly.

Observation
is the first, and in many ways the most important, step in a scientific
inquiry. Without the freedom and encouragement to observe, a blind person
(or anyone else, for that matter) is subtly but decisively turned away
from science.

The
key to this freedom is equality, and the key to equality is opportunity
and respect. The National Federation of the Blind has long championed
the philosophy that the blind are fully as capable as the sighted given
sufficient opportunity and training. Education with this philosophy
as its cornerstone is built on the assumption that no discipline is
closed to the blind. By a logical extension, this basic respect will
open more doors to the world of science as we continue to work for full
participation in society.